The city of Ekurhuleni recently announced that it has adopted the “aerotropolis” route to grow the economy of the region around South Africa’s gateway to Africa and the world, the OR Tambo international airport.
“The First World features of our aerotropolis are bound to rival the best in the world: a rail, road and air infrastructure that makes mobility agile, quick, reliable and accessible; a digital city that attracts the best companies in the world; accommodation, office and related real estate infrastructure that makes the most discerning executives feel at home; and conferencing infrastructure to meet the meeting requirements of any convention or company, big or small,” said Mondli Gungubele, the executive mayor of Ekurhuleni during the launch.
Ekurhuleni’s first citizen believes that the entire southern Africa stands to gain a lot from the aerotropolis. At a conceptual level, an aerotropolis is an urban form that comprises aviation-intensive transport, telecommunication, accommodation, commercial, logistics, industry and related enterprises. It is similar in form and function to a traditional metropolis, which has a central city core and its commuter-linked suburbs.
The innovation that comes with an aerotropolis is that it has an airport city as its core and is surrounded by clusters of aviation-related enterprises of the form outlined above, as well as movement of goods and services. Its key defining features are speed, agility, timeliness and freshness of produce.
What it means for the area There is significant movement of freight and passenger transport emanating from Ekurhuleni to the SADC region and vice versa. Whereas South Africa is home to more than a quarter of all railroad tracks in Africa, the hub of the same South African railway system is located in Ekurhuleni, explained Gungubele.
“This Ekurhuleni-based rail hub connects the SADC region with all major cities and ports in southern Africa: Richards Bay, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Maputo. Roads, railways and airports service Ekurhuleni so well because it boasts a well-developed infrastructure network that incorporates transport, telecommunications and electricity supply. As a municipality, Ekurhuleni is positioned to play a very significant role in the provision of cross-border freight and passenger movement,” says Gungubele.
This sentiment is echoed by Bennett Nikani, member of the Ekurhuleni mayoral committee on city planning and economic development.. “For quite some time, we have not maximised the space around the airport that we could claim to drive economic growth in the region. Through the OR Tambo environmental education and narrative centre we have initiated a project to review economic and growth strategies in Ekurhuleni,” he says.
Benefits
Nikani says that when one factors in the concept of an aerotropolis and appreciating the legacy of OR Tambo, one should not simply build a new airport and be done with it, but rather multiply the benefits around the existing one that extends the economic reach around the airport.
“We want to reclaim the history that has been provided for in the region through the airport, such as the Codesa negotiations which took place in the area in 1991. Ekurhuleni is now developing a cultural precinctin close proximity to the area that speaks to our heritage and one that will attract tourists arriving in South Africa,” he says.
Nikani refers to the creation of a tourist meander that extends from the airport to a welcome village that speaks to he Codesa experience linking to Benoni through the OR Tambo museum, his resting place in Watville and finally the precinct in Leeupan that completes the route.
Significant investment
Such is its commitment the city of Ekurhuleni is investing in excess of R2-billion in this development. Nikani feels that historical areas need to become products to position Ekurhuleni. The municipality is traditionally positioned as a manufacturing hub but precious little is said about its heritage and history.
“We are now beginning to have ‘products’. In the past, we talked about heritage but did not have anything to drive it from a product perspective. Now with such things as the precinct, we can address the needs of the community for economic development while at the same time educating people about our rich heritage,” he says. This economic development will lead to a reduction in the rate of unemployment in the area by redeploying young people back into various community projects.
The city of Ekurhuleni has also decided to bring about a large-scale ICT infrastructure upgrade to the municipality that speaks to the speed and agility of modern society. “The intention with this is to digitise our cities and attract young people to come and live there. As a municipality, we have to focus on three areas. Firstly, we have to continue to maintain our high standard of service delivery in not only the previously advantaged areas but also the cities,” says Nikani. Services need to be developed that are reliable to the clientele of the municipality. From these profits, he says, the funds can be redirected to uplift the downtrodden areas.
A matter of design
He says the second focus area of the municipality is to transform the way development takes place. “Transformation is saying that you cannot have a city like Germiston in the manner that it currently exists. We have to come up with urban design to maximise and optimise our infrastructure to grow human settlement in the cities. An integrated rapid public transport network in our cities must connect people,” Nikani adds.
Finally, he mentions the growth and development of cities when it comes to environmental challenges. To this end, the quality of infrastructure needs to be improved in addition to the reliability of services such as waste collection and the like. “How can we recycle waste to drive energy efficiency and not rely solely on Eskom to power our municipality? These are just some of the things we need to ask ourselves as we continually review our growth and development plans through our economic policy,” he concludes.
This article originally appeared in the Mail & Guardian newspaper as an advertorial supplement